I recently downloaded some Public Domain books from Amazon. They are in the mobi format. When I try to read them in the Calibre viewer it looks like there is no TOC. If I do a conversion to epub there is no TOC. But on my Kindle and Kindle for PC viewer there is an active TOC. Is there any way to access this in a conversion to epub? I hope I am in the right forum for this. Thanks for any assistance.

There are lots of PD books available on Amazon and their quality varies widely. What book did you download?

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Originally Posted by CuttingEdge

They are in the mobi format. When I try to read them in the Calibre viewer it looks like there is no TOC. If I do a conversion to epub there is no TOC. But on my Kindle and Kindle for PC viewer there is an active TOC.

There are two types of Kindle TOCs: HTML TOCs and NCX TOCs. Theoretically, Kindle books should have both types of TOCs, but some older books only have HTML TOCs, which cannot be automatically converted to NCX TOCs, which are required for ePubs.

However, Calibre can automatically generate NCX TOCs if you add the correct XPath expressions (Preferences > Common Options > Table of Content).

(In order to use this option you'll need to find out to the HTML code used for headings.)

Thanks Doitsu. One of the books I downloaded was Blackfeet Indian Stories by George Bird Grinnell. In the Calibre viewer it looks like there is no TOC. Inside the book is an HTML TOC like you said. I don't know much about programming and HTML so I try to muddle around using tools with a GUI interface like Calibre and Sigil to protect me from my own ignorance and help me to achieve my objectives. In this case I was able to convert the book to epub using Calibre and then use Sigil to generate a TOC. Amazingly it worked!

Thank you for the help. I checked out XPath expressions and they look a little intimidating.!!